Defensive coach-speak

Some highlights from afternoon interviews with some defensive coaches:

Defensive coordinator, ED DONATELLOn BYU’s offense: This looks a little more like a pro style. And they are very good. Probably they look too much like a pro team. They’re very efficient and they obviously have a system.

There are definitely some similarities that have held through the years. That’s what makes them good. Through the year’s they’ve held to the integrity of offensive principles and they’ve stood the test of time.

They have built a nice balance into it. They have an excellent player at the running back position who can run and catch the football, and they have a guy who can deliver the ball to him. There’s no question the tight end is outstanding. And the quarterback has two fine receivers that he gets the ball to, and one that the really leans on when he needs something.

Then when you put together the thing about them, because of the way they structure the program, they always have experience in the offensive line, so they don’t get the guy knocked down a lot.

On the Huskies’ first-week tackling woes: This doesn’t challenge me a bit. We just started. We’re teaching, and every time that something doesn’t go right, it’s a great opportunity to teach. You can take it one way or another as a coach: ‘Oh, I can teach something out of that,’ or ‘Oh, that went bad.’ I choose to say let’s teach. If I tell it to that guy correctly, he’ll do it for me. That’s what I always teach.

We tackle in practice. It’s always on your mind in the first game, about how you’re going to do it, because we don’t fire at each other that much. It’s not like you have preseason games. We have a couple of scrimmages, and those are indicators.

But everything we do you have to be more particular about going a step further in practice without knocking the heck out of each other. That isn’t the answer, to just hit everybody. But we’ll look for any way to augment that, whether it be tackling a sled, whether it be getting in position on a little fast guy in practice, trying to be proactive in seeing anything in people’s feet that may relate to that.

Why don’t you tackle live much in practice?: It is battle, and you don’t see our military, they don’t shoot each other before they go to war. You don’t do that or you won’t have anybody to go. But it’s a nice mix of that. Tyrone puts the practice together where there’s just enough of that. It’s something we totally intend to do better. That’s our intention. We make no excuses, we intend to do better.

We did feel like we left our feet, but ultimately that all comes down to the coach and my preparation with the guys. There’s technique related to it, there’s angles related to it. I didn’t think our men were way out of position often in the game. The one where they guy caught the ball way up the sideline; yes, we were out of position. But there were a lot of guys in position.

Defensive backs coach, J.D. WILLIAMSIs there a “here-we-go-again” feeling among the players after that first loss? I don’t think there’s that ‘here-we-go’ feeling. Kids realize some mistakes were made, we find out solutions to get them corrected. And those are simple.

We had a situation where the receiver catches a hitch and runs up field, which is a miscommunication there, and those can be corrected. It wasn’t anything where they just physically beat us, it was kind of some mental mistakes going on, so we’ll be fine.

On Week 1 to Week 2 improvement You get a lot of first-game jitters. Some guys are throwing up in the locker room, you never know.

I can remember playing way back when, you had players nervous. There’s first game jitters. We had a lot of guys going into their first game. So, there were some nerves going on there. It should be a lot better this week.